Abstract: Han Kang’s novel We Do Not Part (작별하지 않는다, 2021), a meditation on the extraordinary violence of state counterinsurgency campaigns on Cheju Island in 1948-1949, bears an interesting relationship to the Cheju 4.3 Archive, an unevenly digitized collection recently added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This talk introduces this relationship by considering the adaptation of the novel’s fictionalized sites into a local “dark tour,” the place of nature and landscape in the longer genealogy of 4.3 writing to which the text belongs, and the broader role of the digital humanities in interdisciplinary research on mass violence.
